12
Cassie awoke just before four in the morning, recalled where she was, and reached out to the side of the bed where Enrico had been. She knew she would feel only empty sheets there: he’d been gone for seven hours now. It had been a little before nine at night when she’d been resting beside him, her head on his chest, and she’d heard herself murmuring that she was exhausted and should get some sleep. He was so young that at first he hadn’t understood this was her way of gently excusing him. He’d pulled her closer to him. She’d had to explain that she preferred sleeping alone (which wasn’t always the case, but was last night). She’d reassured him that she’d see him again in a week or so, when she was back in Rome, but in her heart she doubted she would. The airline would most likely be using the same hotel, but she’d steer clear of the bar. Now that she was sober, she wondered what in the name of God she’d been thinking picking up the bartender at the hotel where she was staying, but she knew the answer: she wasn’t thinking. She was on her third Negroni. By the time he had finished his shift and they went upstairs to her room, she’d finished five.
Negronis in Rome. Akvavit in Stockholm. Arak in Dubai. Her life was a drinking tour of the world.
If only she had brought Sokolov back to her hotel room in the Emirates and then kicked him out. If only she had followed through on her intentions to leave his. Instead she had blacked out. That was how much she had drunk that night last week.
And it was last week. God. Somewhere the hyenas were circling…
She understood enough about her body clock to know that she probably wasn’t going to fall back to sleep now, but she wasn’t due downstairs in the lobby for hours. And so she climbed out of bed, switched on the light, and pulled the terrycloth robe from the closet. She didn’t mind the sight of her naked body in the mirrors—and this hotel room indeed had a lot of them—but the room was chilly. The digital thermostat was set for Celsius, so she upped it a few digits and hoped she wasn’t going to cook herself.
She saw she had phone messages. Her lawyer again. The FBI again. Her sister. She listened only to the one from Rosemary, just to make sure that nothing horrid had happened to her nephew or niece. Nothing had. Rosemary was calling to say hello and remind her that she and her family were coming to New York that weekend. She wanted to know if Cassie could join them at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday and then go to dinner in Chinatown.
She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the messages from Ani or Frank Hammond. But she didn’t delete them either. Perhaps she should splurge and have some oatmeal and an Irish coffee sent up to her room. The kitchen was open twenty-four hours. Even if they didn’t have someone in the kitchen who could properly top the drink at this hour—the thick cream was actually her favorite part—they could toss a shot of Jameson’s into the coffee. Then, properly fortified, she could hear what Ani and Frank had to say and take stock of her situation.
« «
She Googled “trauma” on her tablet as she spooned the oatmeal in small bites and sipped her spiked coffee. She wondered if people who woke beside corpses were scarred for life, though she presumed there was, at best, a very small body of evidence from which to make deductions. For a few minutes she took comfort in the essays and research papers she found that suggested the families of murder victims often needed serious counseling and medication to get over the loss, equating herself with those poor souls, but then she recalled Alex Sokolov’s parents and began to imagine what they were experiencing.
Finally she braced herself and listened to the messages from Ani and Frank Hammond. Her lawyer said that she had information on extradition laws she wanted to share. Cassie couldn’t decide from the woman’s voice whether it was good news or bad. The FBI agent said he was just crossing a few t’s and had a couple quick questions, and he was wondering if she’d mind coming downtown to the agency’s offices. He sounded casual, but she had a sense—that gift of fear—that he was playing dumb. That he was playing her. Surely he suspected she was the woman in the security camera photos. And if this was just a minor follow-up, why the request that she visit the office in lower Manhattan?
She recalled her moment on the subway platform the day before, her fear that someone was tailing her, and then the figure she had seen at the sidewalk entrance as her cab sped away. Maybe it hadn’t been an overreaction. Perhaps this was what FBI surveillance felt like: there was always someone just beyond your peripheral vision. Then again, the FBI knew what they were doing. Would she know she was being watched? Probably not. Maybe this was what paranoia felt like.
Though the sun was rising here, it was still late at night in New York. She couldn’t yet call back either Ani or Hammond. And given that the flight’s wheels up from Fiumicino was 11:05 a.m., she wouldn’t be phoning either of them until the plane landed at JFK. By the time the passengers had deplaned and she was free, it would be close to 3:30 in the afternoon on the East Coast. So be it.
She sent Ani a text that she had heard the message and would connect with her as soon as she had landed in New York. She added that Frank Hammond had called her twice, but she wouldn’t ring him back until they had spoken. She pulled the drapes and gazed out the window. She could see a few blocks in the distance the twin bell towers of the Trinità dei Monti, the church that stood atop the Spanish Steps. It dawned on her that any day now Alex Sokolov was probably going to be buried. By now his body had to be back in the United States. She wondered who he was—who he really was. She recalled the way he had gently washed her hair, massaging her scalp rather expertly as she’d sat on his lap on that marble bench in that elegant bathroom, and how that night he had kept up with her drink for drink. Few men could do that.
Likewise, she contemplated Miranda with her serene smile and her French twist, her gift of a bottle of Stoli. Who was she?
Cassie swallowed the last of her coffee, and fantasized traveling to Virginia to say something to Alex’s parents. Tell them how sorry she was that their son had died and she had left him behind in the bed. Ask them what they knew of this woman named Miranda. But she understood that she couldn’t—or, to be precise, that she shouldn’t. And that only made her feel worse. She told herself that her sadness was part of her trauma.
Her guilt. Yes. Guilt.
She wondered if people—ordinary people, not serial killers or Tony Soprano—who got away with murder made promises to be better people. Did they vow they would do good work in the future? Actively search out and find God? Did they…atone? She wasn’t convinced she had any of that in her. She wished that she did. But she wasn’t sure it mattered because she hadn’t gotten away with murder: she continued to believe, even if she was pathetically deluding herself, that she hadn’t hurt Alex Sokolov. Perhaps no one else would believe that, but she did. Moreover, so far she hadn’t gotten away with anything. The FBI still wanted to see her. The photos of her from the Royal Phoenician were now online. Soon she would be exposed, fully and irrevocably.
Below her on the street she watched a blue Vespa race by, the driver a young girl with blond hair and blue jeans. She saw an older woman on the sidewalk with a canvas bag filled with, among other items, a large loaf of bread. There was a delivery truck parked beside a store that sold lighting fixtures, and there were two men unloading large cardboard boxes. And in the apartment building across the street she watched the tenants through the windows: A fellow her age tucked his necktie into his shirt before sipping his espresso from a small cup and gazing down at something on the kitchen counter. A woman in a black blazer and skirt was blow-drying her hair in what looked like a rather petite living room. Another woman vacuumed.
She stripped off her robe and stood naked for a long minute in front of the window. She honestly wasn’t sure why. She made eye contact with none of the people in the windows across the street and had no idea whether they noticed her or cared. It was a hotel. They probably witnessed assignations and saw exhibitionists all the time. Then she went to the shower, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and scrubbed a bartender named Enrico off her body.
« «
Later that morning when she and Jackson, the young flight attendant from Oklahoma, were at the entrance to the aircraft and greeting the passengers as they boarded, he turned to her and said quietly, “I have a big idea.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I think we should give everyone in coach a Xanax. It should be airline policy. Can you imagine how easy our job would be if we medicated people properly before squishing them into those seats?”
« «
Cassie heard the passengers shrieking, a small chorus in rows thirty-three and thirty-four, the section of coach that was four seats across sandwiched between two aisles, and for a second she feared that someone had a box cutter or a gun. The panic had what she always speculated was the “this-plane-is-going-down” terror to it. But then, almost as one, the call buttons chimed and she saw the red dots on the ceiling there light up like a bough on a Christmas tree, and the simple reasonableness of passengers pressing their call buttons calmed her. She put down the large plastic bag with the service items—airline-speak for trash—and raced seven rows forward from the rear galley and into the scrum. They were below ten thousand feet now and everyone was supposed to be buckled in as they approached JFK; she herself had only moments before she was supposed to be strapped in as well. Jackson was running up the aisle parallel to her, and the two of them got to row thirty-four at almost the same time. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but she was glad there were two of them and that one of them was male.
“No, stop it! Stop it!” was the one sentence among the screams that seemed to register most cogently in her mind. For a moment she thought, Stop what?, but then she saw and she knew. There in seat D, one of the two middle seats in the middle section, was a grandmother holding her grandson—or, to be precise, holding her grandson’s little penis, grasping it with two fingers as if it were a joint (a roach clip was actually what Cassie saw in her mind)—the child’s blue jeans and underpants down around his ankles, as he stood between the rows and urinated into the airsickness bag she was clutching with her other hand.
No, he was only trying to urinate into the airsickness bag. Mostly he was missing. Mostly he was spraying the back of seat 33D and into the space between the seats, showering the passengers’ arms and laps. And the kid was, apparently, a camel. Cassie and Jackson both commanded the woman to stop the child, and then they yelled at the boy to stop, but this was a tsunami. The grandmother either didn’t speak English or was pretending not to speak English, and she did not pull up the boy’s pants until, without question, he was done. From the passengers came a cacophony of curses and groans, a choral keening of disgust. The teen girl in seat 33E was in tears as she struggled to extricate herself from a very damp orange hoodie. “Ewwww,” she sobbed each time she exhaled, a plaintive, almost biblical ululation.
Cassie chastised the grandmother, telling her that what she had done was absolutely unacceptable. The old woman ignored her, clipped shut the folds at the top of the airsickness bag, and then handed it to her, smiling as if she were presenting Cassie with a bakery bag full of cookies.
« «
Cassie knew that newspapers put stories online well before the actual paper went to print, so she guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised when she saw the photo of herself on the New York Post website on her phone on the Airporter bus to Grand Central. But she was surprised. She wanted to vomit, and actually feared for a moment that she might. She was the mystery woman, the unnamed “black widow spider” who may have murdered a handsome young American money manager in Dubai. Moreover, someone had spoken with the hotel and restaurant employees, all of whom agreed that the woman they had seen with Sokolov was likely American. For the moment, everyone seemed to presume she was an American who lived in the United Arab Emirates. That’s what the waitress at the restaurant had said. She’d told the Dubai police that Alex had said something that made it clear that while he was a visitor to the Emirates, the woman he was with was not. Cassie couldn’t imagine what that was, but guessed it must have been some remark between them about how well she knew the city. She’d said something like that, because she had bid on the route often the last year and a half. In any case, the Dubai authorities were scouring the American community there, seeing who might have hooked up with him at the hotel.
She wished that Ani would call her back. She’d called the lawyer the moment she was inside the terminal and left a message.
This was water torture, she decided, this slow, relentless drip. The authorities had to work backward to get to her: they had to rule out all of the women he might have already known in the city and all of the women living there it was possible that he had met. They had to show those photos to all of his friends and all of his business associates. They were probably showing them to the people he worked with at Unisphere in America. And so it felt like it was taking forever for them to, once and for all, focus only on her.
But she knew this: whatever was coming was getting closer.
« «
When she got home, she finally connected with Ani. She rolled her suitcase into her bedroom and collapsed onto the couch to look up at the Empire State Building through windows speckled with city grime and summer grit. The sky was blue, however, and though it was August now and the days were noticeably shorter than a month ago, the sun was still high.
“How was Rome?” Ani asked.
“Not glamorous. I stayed at the hotel. I didn’t feel like going out.” She took a breath and said, “I’ve seen the pictures on the New York Post website.”
“Yup. They weren’t online yet when I called you. But I’ve seen them, too. I rather doubt it will be a front-page story in the paper edition tomorrow. It was Dubai, after all.”
“That’s the bright side.”
“Yes. But I have good news.”
And instantly she knew what Ani was about to say, and she closed her eyes and realized she was crying. Again. And she didn’t care. It was as if she had just gotten a call from a doctor about a biopsy and it was negative, and the doctor was explaining that she didn’t have cancer. “Go on,” she said.
“Highly unlikely you’ll be extradited. That amendment I told you about? An American citizen is indeed exempt.”
“That means I could only be extradited to Dubai if I weren’t American?”
“Correct.”
“So, then, what’s next?”
“Call back the FBI, but tell them nothing. Nothing. Say things like I don’t remember. Let me think about it. If they insist on seeing you—and they might—I’ll go with you and we’ll meet with them together.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Want to see you? I think a lot depends on who Alex Sokolov really was or how well connected the family really is. Frankly, I’m more than a little shocked that the FBI seems to be so deeply involved. I’ve done my homework now, and Dubai doesn’t need the FBI. They’re not amateurs. They know what they’re doing.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve also done a little more research into Sokolov.”
Cassie held her phone against her ear with her shoulder and blew her nose almost silently. “And?”
“And everything suggests he really was a hedge fund manager. Yes, he’s based in New York, but all the money runs through the Caribbean.”
“What does that mean?”
“It could mean nothing. It could mean anything. Whenever the money goes through a place like Grand Cayman, you have to wonder. The U.S. can’t track it as easily—if at all. The Treasury Department has something called an OFAC list. It’s a whole bunch of seriously sketchy foreign nationals or groups, and American banks or funds can’t accept money from any of them. So if you want to work with those characters, you have to work through the Caribbean.”
“So he was doing something shady?” Cassie asked. “The FBI believes he was involved with people on that list?”
“Maybe.”
“Is that why he was killed?”
“Well, we wouldn’t kill him for that. If he was doing something illegal, I kind of think we’d just arrest him.”
“So why did…they…kill him?”
“Maybe he was stealing,” Ani answered, and Cassie found herself relieved that the lawyer hadn’t begun her response, even in jest, with something along the lines of Assuming you didn’t kill him? “You know, skimming off the top,” she continued. “Or maybe he was running some Ponzi scheme and he went too far. Got in too deep.”
“Good God, if no one slashed Bernie Madoff’s throat, why would the investors take out poor Alex? What he did had to have been small potatoes by comparison.”
“We don’t know it was small potatoes. We just don’t. There could be a lot of Russian money in that fund. You don’t steal from the Russians. I’m Armenian, trust me. I know. They can be seriously badass.”
“He just didn’t seem like the type.”
“When people need money or love money, they sometimes make very bad decisions,” she reminded Cassie. Then: “The family published his first full obituary. You can find it online. It’s in the Charlottesville Progress. Here are a few things I learned that are not in the obit: Grandfather emigrated here from the Soviet Union when Stalin was still Stalin: 1951. Unsure precisely how. He was a soldier in the Second World War. Self-made man after he got here. Settled in Virginia. Became a lawyer and married a good southern girl with money. I’ve already had a private investigator do a little digging. I’m going to have him do a little more.”
“Can I afford that?”
“No. But he won’t go crazy. I just want to learn a bit about the family and about Alex. See what sorts of interests he might have had.”
“Business interests?”
“Yes. It might be helpful to discover precisely what was in the fund. But I was thinking personal interests, too.”
“Can you tell me more?” Cassie asked.
“No, but only because there isn’t anything more to tell at this point.”
“What about Miranda?”
“What about her?”
“Did you find out anything more about her?”
“Like does she really work with Alex or does she or her family really have money in this magical fund?” asked Ani.
“Yes.”
“Unisphere Asset Management has easily six or seven hundred employees in New York, Washington, Moscow, and Dubai. None of them are named Miranda.”
“You checked?”
“My investigator did, yes.”
“Can he find out if she’s an investor?”
“Maybe. But I’m not confident.”
“Is it possible she made up the name?”
“If she killed him? Absolutely,” said Ani, her tone decisive. Then: “You should call back Frank Hammond. Then call me back. Let’s plan on meeting tomorrow, regardless of whether he wants to see you again.”
Tomorrow was Friday. She had something on Friday. Maybe. She flipped through the calendar in her mind, trying to recall what it was. Then it came to her: Rosemary. Her nephew and niece. She needed to call Rosemary back because her sister and her family were coming to New York. Her sister had said something about the zoo on Saturday, so she guessed she wasn’t going to see them tomorrow.
“Sure,” she told Ani. “What time?”
“Come by my office around twelve fifteen. There’s a really good falafel cart around the corner on Fifty-Third Street, and it’s supposed to be a beautiful day. Do you like falafel? We could eat al fresco.”
“That’s fine,” she said, not really answering the question.
“Okay. But call me after you talk to the FBI.”
« «
“The air marshal on the flight said you and Sokolov were talking a lot. He noticed,” Frank Hammond was saying on the phone.
“I don’t remember,” Cassie said, as she opened her suitcase and started unpacking. A part of her knew that she shouldn’t be multitasking: all her attention should be on the FBI agent. But the unpacking was calming her.
“And the other crew members said he was your guy.”
“My guy?”
“Your section.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And you two had a lot of interaction.”
“I doubt I had any more ‘interaction’ with him than I did with any other passengers I was serving,” she said. It was a lie, but interaction struck her as a vague, ridiculous word that was impossible to quantify. She wondered whether the flight crew was volunteering her name so enthusiastically or whether it was only the air marshal. She guessed it was also possible that Hammond had phrased his sentence this way because he was bluffing: he was trying to frighten her into believing that he knew more than he did.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “You chatted. A lot. It wasn’t just about the wine list.”
“I was polite. He was polite.”
“You were flirting. He was flirting.”
“Maybe he flirted with me a little,” she said. “But passengers flirt. They’re bored. They flirt with all of us when it’s a long flight.”
“Got it. Anyway, that’s why I’d like you to come in and chat. I want to see if Sokolov might have said something that can help us help the authorities in Dubai. That’s all.”
“May I bring a lawyer?” she asked. She wished instantly that she hadn’t inquired. What if he said no? But he didn’t. She dropped a dirty blouse into the hamper.
“That’s your right,” he answered simply.
“Okay, let me find out when my lawyer is free.”
“But we want to see you tomorrow.”
There wasn’t precisely an edge to his voice, but for the first time he hadn’t sounded quite so casual. Quite so laid back. It suddenly felt a lot less like this was busywork to him. And so she called back Ani and then she called back the agent, and they agreed to meet the next day at the FBI offices downtown at Broadway and Worth. She said that she’d be there at two o’clock sharp.
« «
She read the obituary in the newspaper, matching the man recalled in the story with the one who had made love to her in Dubai:
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Alexander Peter Sokolov, 32, died July 27, 2018, while traveling for business in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. He was born March 15, 1986, in Alexandria, Virginia. Alex, as he liked to be called, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia, double majoring in mathematics and foreign affairs, and then earned a Master of Quantitative Management at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He helped run the Stalwarts Fund for Unisphere Asset Management out of their Manhattan office. He loved his job because he loved data, but he also loved the fact that his work took him often to Russia, the Middle East, and the Far East. He was fearless, whether he was playing his beloved squash or exploring the world. But he was also a kind and generous friend and son. He loved movies and books, especially Russian literature, but most of all he loved anything surprising and new. He leaves behind a grieving father and mother, Gregory and Harper, as well as an extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins who will miss him dearly.
The funeral was the day after tomorrow, Saturday, at a Presbyterian church in Charlottesville. She imagined it crowded with Alex’s classmates from the University of Virginia, his childhood friends, and at least some of the employees he worked with at Unisphere. A part of her wanted to go, but she knew that she shouldn’t. She wouldn’t.
The obituary was short and actually revealed very little. In the end, that didn’t surprise her, either.
« «
She stared at the text from Buckley the actor. He said he had an audition on Friday for a pilot that was going to film in New York in the autumn, and had to get a haircut first thing in the morning. He wanted to know what country she was in, but hoped wherever she was, she was dancing barefoot. She recalled how her tale of the dead passenger in the coach bathroom had made him smile. She hadn’t answered his last text, but she decided to answer this one. She told him that she had just flown in from Rome, her feet were killing her, and the last thing she did before strapping in before landing was empty an airsickness bag full of some little boy’s pee into the lavatory. She added that the bag wasn’t full, because a lot of the urine had wound up on the passengers in the row ahead of the child, and he should take a moment and read the venom about the flight and the airline on Twitter. The hashtag, which already had a life of its own, was #WorstFlightThatDidntCrash. (It was actually a rather high bar, she thought, when she saw the hashtag gaining momentum.)
He suggested a late lunch the next day, after his audition, and she wondered what he would have thought if she had texted back that she was seeing her lawyer and then the FBI right about that time. She thought of the way they had parted the previous Sunday morning and sighed. She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn’t as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.
She texted back that she was busy during the day tomorrow and going to the zoo on Saturday with her nephew and niece. She thought it made her seem wholesome—certainly more wholesome than she was. She suggested dinner tomorrow night and he agreed.
She couldn’t imagine what condition she’d be in after a second interview with the FBI and the print edition of the New York Post hitting the stands. She wondered if he would see the image and recognize her.
At some point she’d kicked off her shoes and pulled off her pantyhose, but she honestly couldn’t remember when. She had taken the bookend with Romulus and Remus from her suitcase and placed it on the glass coffee table. She couldn’t recall doing that either. It must have been when she was on the phone with the FBI. She stretched her toes; her feet really were killing her. She never had gotten that manicure, and now she needed a pedicure, too. That’s what she’d do this August evening. That would be her exciting Thursday night. She’d call neither Paula with her love for Drambuie nor Gillian with her willingness to pick up the pieces of the messes she left behind. (Momentarily she was struck by the ironically sobering revelation that all of her friends always expected the worst from her. But surrounded as she was by far more troubling and immediate realities, the insight passed.) She’d call no one. She’d steer clear of the bars and be level-headed and crisp tomorrow morning when she picked up the New York Post, when she met with Ani and Frank, and when—once more—she had to face the ghost of poor Alex Sokolov.
« «
It was after five on a Thursday afternoon in the summer, but she reminded herself that people were still working. There might be people in the office.
And so that part of her that even sober cavalierly hopscotched across lines most adults had the common sense to respect led her now to the soaring atrium of an office building on the Avenue of the Americas. Here was where Unisphere housed its Manhattan employees and where, once upon a time, Alex Sokolov had worked. The idea had come to her when she had been stripping off her uniform, planning to change into a casual summer slip of a dress for a mani-pedi and then a quiet evening at home. Instead she put on a blouse and skirt and pantyhose, and took a cab to the building on Forty-Ninth Street. She simply had to know more than she was learning on the web, especially with another face-to-face meeting with the FBI tomorrow afternoon.
She told one of the two uniformed men behind the chest-high marble counter that she had a five-thirty appointment with Alex Sokolov, showed them her driver’s license, and signed in. But when they asked her to write her name in the book, she scribbled something that looked more like Alessandra than Cassandra and a last name that was indecipherable.
As she expected, after a few minutes a slim, statuesque woman in a black blazer emerged from the elevator bank. She had gray eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, and introduced herself as Jean Miller from Human Resources. “And your name is Cassandra?” she continued.
“Alessandra,” Cassie answered. She shrugged. “They sound the same.”
“Alessandra…what?”
“Ricci. Alessandra Ricci.”
The executive motioned toward a marble bench far from the elevators and led Cassie there. “Let’s sit down.”
“Is everything all right?” Cassie asked. “I thought at first you were Alex’s assistant and were going to escort me upstairs. But you said you’re with personnel. Has something happened?”
She nodded. “Yes. Something has. I’m so sorry you haven’t heard and I’m so sorry I’m the one who has to tell you.” She took a breath. Then: “Alex was killed last week in Dubai.”
Cassie wrapped her arms around her chest and stared at Jean, hoping that she wasn’t overacting. “My God. Killed? How?”
“Someone stabbed him. Or, I guess, cut his throat. In his hotel room.”
“That’s horrible. Just awful,” she murmured, looking down at her shoes and shaking her head. “Why? Have they caught the person? Or the people?”
“No, they haven’t. And we don’t know why. The motive was probably robbery.”
“In Dubai? That city’s supposed to be so safe.”
“I guess things can happen anywhere,” said Jean.
“He was such a sweet guy. Did you know him well?”
“I knew him better than I did some of the other managers.”
“How come?”
“He was from Virginia. I’m from North Carolina. Not a lot of southerners in this office. So even though our paths weren’t likely to cross all that often for work, we sometimes had coffee. Sometimes we chatted. ‘Visited,’ as we might say in the South.”
Cassie almost said that she was from Kentucky, a reflex. She stopped herself just in time. Instead she said, “He introduced me to Russian literature. I hadn’t read Tolstoy, not even in college, until we met.”
Jean smiled. “He was weirdly bookish.”
“Weirdly?”
“The sort of man who runs a hedge fund isn’t usually the sort of man we think of curled up with a book.”
“What books did he talk to you about?”
“Oh, you know…”
Cassie waited, hoping Jean would elaborate, but she didn’t. When she remained silent, Cassie said finally, “He loved Tolstoy and Pushkin. Turgenev. We talked about whatever he was taking with him to read on airplanes all the time.”
“I’m glad you two shared that.”
“He had a girlfriend in Dubai—a friend who was a girl. Her name was Miranda. Any idea who that might be? He ever mention her when you two would…visit?”
“Why?”
“He told me he was going to have dinner with her when he was there. He was looking forward to it. They were just friends, but he was hoping it would become something more. He had a crush on her. You said you knew him a bit. Did he ever talk about her? Miranda?”
Jean looked at her a little more intensely now. “What’s her last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t, either,” she said. “But I’ll be sure and tell the police about her. The FBI, actually. I think you need to speak to them, too.”
“Yes, of course. Absolutely.”
“Tell me, why were you supposed to meet with Alex today? His assistant had nothing on his calendar this afternoon. He wasn’t even supposed to be in America today. I asked her on my way downstairs.”
“Was he supposed to be in Dubai still?”
“Moscow.”
“He traveled a lot.”
“He did. Was your meeting today a personal thing, Alessandra? Is that why he didn’t tell his assistant?”
She shrugged. “We’re friends, yes. We were friends. Sorry. But I was also a client of his. Of yours.” She recalled his obituary. “I’m invested in the Stalwarts Fund.”
Jean seemed to take this in, absorbing the information. Cassie considered the possibility that she simply didn’t look wealthy enough to be an investor. But then Jean said, shaking her head ever so slightly, “That is such an old boy fund. Such an old man fund. Why did you invest in it?”
“Alex recommended it.”
She sighed. “I thought we’d called every one of his clients to tell them what had happened to poor Alex.”
“Maybe I have a voice mail I missed.”
“Maybe. But we were persistent,” Jean said, and for the first time she sounded slightly dubious. “I really was under the impression that we’d spoken with everyone. Everyone.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Would you like me to schedule a meeting for next week with someone about your account? Or a phone call tomorrow?” She pulled a phone from her blazer pocket and opened a calendar app. “We can do this right now.”
“Yes. Certainly. Who would that be?”
“We have a couple of managers who are diving in. You tell me what’s convenient for you.”
“Okay,” she agreed, and she suggested anytime on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, and then offered a fake phone number and a fake e-mail address. When Jean stood, Cassie stood with her and exited back into the summer heat, aware that the executive probably was memorizing every detail about her that she could. She guessed the woman would be on the phone with the FBI before she had even crossed the street.
« «
As she walked south, she inventoried in her mind the little she had learned: Alex was going to Moscow from Dubai and he had never mentioned a person named Miranda to this other Unisphere employee. He ran a fund that, at least in the opinion of this woman from personnel, had a select group of investors: old boys. She couldn’t fully translate what that meant, but she had a sense it meant Russian. Old Russians. In her mind, she saw a portrait of the Politburo, circa 1967. A lot of bald white guys with bad haircuts.
It wasn’t much, but it was something, and she was glad she had gone there.
It was while crossing Fifth Avenue near the library that she felt it: a prickle of unease along her skin. A shiver along the back of her neck. She knew the word from a psychology course she’d taken in college: scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched. She had the exact feeling now that she had experienced the other day when she had fled from the subway. She looked to her right and saw there in the other crosswalk, also walking east, a fellow in shades and a black ball cap. It wasn’t an uncommon look, not at all, but hadn’t the guy watching her on the subway platform—maybe watching her on the subway platform—been wearing a similar cap and similar shades? Of course he had. She tried to catch his hair color, but couldn’t. She tried to guess his age, but she couldn’t guess that either. He could be twenty and he could be fifty.
She continued walking and considered whether to confront him. If anyplace was going to be safe for this sort of engagement, it would be late on a summer afternoon in midtown Manhattan. She tried to imagine his response, and presumed the sort of denial she’d get from an FBI agent would be different from the kind she’d hear from a…
A what? An assassin? The person who’d killed Alex Sokolov?
She stopped at the corner of Madison, planning to cross the street to his side. At the very least, she would get close enough to see who he was. The idea that this might not be an FBI agent had given her pause, and she was less confident now that she would actually ask him why he was following her. But she had been emboldened by her visit to Unisphere. She’d gone there and was a little wiser now. Nothing cataclysmic had occurred.
But when she reached the far side of the street he was gone—if he had ever really been there at all.